Let's kick some ASCII

Been working on basically the game still since the last post, though it's been rewritten and reconceptualized over and over and over.

Granted I don't make releasing an actual thing my top goal, I'm still in this to learn or whatever, I'm weird like that, but I'd love for something to take shape.

This blog still exists(?)! I’m going to try and be active here yet again, here is a link to this prototype on my github: https://github.com/zolvaring/curses_rpg_demo

This is a project I stopped working on a little over a year ago, but I’m planning on heavily referencing for another similar project I’m slowly trying to get started. It showcases a procedurally generated landscape (only one functional level, but there are scraps of other palettes available), enemies, items, and some other nifty features I’ll show off in some future posts.

It is built entirely using Curses and Python, and meant to be run from a terminal.

By the way, I can’t even begin to blog about this game without at least giving a huge amount of thanks to Jotaf for creating this tutorial on Python development using libtcod library: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python%2Blibtcod

I’ve been working on this project for a while now but literally started with no knowledge of Python, and only simple websites as programming experience, and started using the code within that document. That source code, along with the tutorial explaining the logic behind it, has literally been teaching my Python in my spare time from experimentation and I cannot give it enough praise. 

I understand a lot of people are into pygame and I want to check that out perhaps later in development, but this tutorial really gets a lot of great use out of libtcod and is literally the best resource I have found for python rpg development from scratch. 

Currently trying to enable backgrounds to be “palettized” instead of just a solid color or black undiscovered background. 

I’m doing it in a way where, once it’s done, I should be able to apply it easily to all other room generation, but in this specific case I’m trying to create an outdoor effect containing a dirt area inside a heavy forest. 

I can polish it perfection later in development, but I am still improving it currently. Before I’m done with it today I want to:

- Quiet down the forest palette

- Apply a different but similar effect to the dirt area, so it is not a solid color

- Expand the dirt area a little in some way, to counter the negative space exposed by allowing forest tiles to not block sight (for outdoor effect)

- Add some objects to dirt area, particularly a path of some sort, and maybe more trees or more developed tree mechanics (currently you can chop trees  to turn them into raw wood, but they don’t grow back or anything)